Blunt reverses e-mail policy, refuses to admit it

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Like a driver who makes a U-turn and insists he never got lost, Gov. Matt Blunt has reversed course on his e-mail deletion policies but refuses to admit it.

The same governor who has regularly deleted government e-mails now has ordered they all be saved. And the same administration that once denied e-mails must be kept as public records now wants them all preserved for public inspection.

Blunt won't acknowledge either the reversal or any error in deleting e-mails.

Instead, he insists he was always heading in the right direction -- both when he defended the destruction of government e-mails and when he last week ordered their preservation.

Blunt is attempting to switch positions while proclaiming he never moved.

In much the same way, when campaigning for governor in June 2004, Blunt distanced himself from House Republicans who wanted to trim the Medicaid rolls by making it harder to be eligible for the health-care program. He suggested the state should first try to root out waste, fraud and abuse.

"I am opposed to changing the eligibility requirements until we've done everything we can to ensure we're efficiently spending the Medicaid dollars that we have today," Blunt said.

Yet 16 days into office, Blunt's first budget proposed to cut 89,000 people off Medicaid and reduce services for several hundred thousand others.

Blunt could have explained that he had to change course because the state's budget was badly out of whack -- a claim that would have been true.

Instead, Blunt refused to admit the reversal.

"I didn't change my mind, and I kept a pledge to Missourians that we wouldn't examine eligibility until we had done everything we can to maximize the use of those Medicaid dollars," Blunt said in January 2005.

But everything had not been done to eliminate waste. It wasn't until 2007 that lawmakers finally passed a bill cracking down on Medicaid fraud by doctors, hospitals and others.

This September, Blunt acknowledged that he and his staff members regularly delete e-mails. He asserted that "nobody saves e-mails for three years," as required in some instances under Missouri's document retention policies.

At the time, Blunt spokesman Rich Chrismer told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that "there is no statute or case that requires the state to retain individuals' e-mails as a public record."

In fact, the state open-record law does cover e-mails, defining a public record as either "written or electronically stored."

Last week, Blunt ordered his Office of Administration to come up with a way to make sure all state e-mails are saved and open for public inspection. The only exceptions would be e-mails on topics specifically allowed to be closed under the Sunshine Law, such as personnel issues.

Asked Friday if Blunt had reversed course, Chrismer emphatically replied: "Absolutely not." Not on e-mail retention policies, not on his higher education plan, not on Medicaid cuts. Chrismer tried to shift the emphasis: "The governor is focused on real results."

So why does Blunt, or his staff, continue to deny it when he changes course?

"I think for some politicians, they believe it's an admission of weakness and invites more opposition as a result," said political scientist Dave Robertson, of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "But I don't think it's fatal for people to say that they've changed their mind on further review."